Great question @kristinawing – There isn’t a great reporting system for non-compliant contests.  Facebook has a place to report some issues:  http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=178608028874393  But contests aren’t specified. 

The Pages also have a Report feature on the lower left side-bar of each page but again, a contest violation isn’t there.  I have only heard of one actual case of a page being completely shut down because of a contest violation.  So I don’t have any definitive answer – you can report it indirectly to Facebook help but my advice is to just keep playing by the rules and Facebook may catch up to the violators eventually.

I work with a guy who used to manage social media at another company, and they had built a large fan base on a fan page (well over 10,000 which for them was large), and their page was deleted over night with no warning.  When they got through to facebook to complain about it, facebook cited violations of the promotions guidelines as the reason.  So it happens, but I have no idea how or why.  

I refuse participate, or continue to manage any facebook page where my clients insist on breaking the rules, I don’t want that on my reputation.

I too would appreciate some information on this! 

No you don’t need to tag on each post, @elauragreen, but it does give a notification and gets a little more visibility for sure!  But I am, and I’m sure others are, regularly checking on the threads to see the new posts.

Many of the Contest apps have suggested rules as a template but definitely take a look at Social Media Examiner’s rules on our current contest as a great template:  http://apps.facebook.com/smallbizcontest/rules

@AndreaVahl I have a related question.  I read on this post (http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-promotions-what-you-need-to-know/) by Mary Smith that you are not allowed to pick a fan at random to give a prize.   How is then Facebook Apps like “Fan of the Week” getting around this to give prizes to a fan that is randomly chosen? 

Thanks.

Thanks @KristinaWing for your detailed answer.  I am really not interested in reporting any pages, but I do want to understand the rules clearly so I am giving proper advice to my clients.

As to the app “Fan of the Week”, they help page owners pick their most active fan and feature them, which is kosher, but then they also offer customization where the page owner can give a prize to a selected fan who is most active.  Essentially, giving a prize to people for being active on their page, It says so on Facebook:

http://apps.facebook.com/fanofthe/

What I see people doing is featuring the fan and announcing them as a winner both on the app-specific tab and on their wall (like in the case study shown).  I thought announcing winners on the page wall was a no no.  My guess is just by having a separate tab for giving the prize, everything becomes kosher, even thought it is also being announced on the wall!

What do you think?

Thank you @AndreaVahl This way it is actually better, since the page owner can collect email addresses.  I am guessing, but since Facebook has approved the app, getting a prize probably has to involve actively signing up to be considered.  I’ll have to look into it.  Thanks again!

Hi @kristinawing  @andrea-vahl and everyone!

It’s really difficult to understand the Promotions Guidelines of Facebook. I think they left a lot of things “open”, you know what I mean? Even if you want to do what is right… the guidelines are very tricky for us. Maybe because we don’t understand quite good the english.
We’ve the same problem as you @kristinawing and… sometimes we doubt about our White hat techniques to create games and contest.

Let me ask you to you all, to see of we are breaking the rules with this kind of promos/games/contest/whatever when we have a product launching:
- We create a photo album (because it has a lot more visuality than a single picture)
- Then we ask people to LIKE or SHARE the album. Each time they LIKE, we discount for example $0.1 from the price, and for each SHARE, we discount $0.5.

Result: we have HUGE amount of new fans… and a lot of sales too!

For you… this is breaking the rules?

Thanks @vincentedwards for give us your thoughts but… how Facebook determines who or when penalize a page?

My client’s main competitor doesn’t care about rules… and they have the double of fans! Is not fair!

@vincentedwards yes but… you can’t report because a “Rules breaking”.
I think Facebook just penalize randomly. That is my only explanation.

I’ve found a lot of pages that has, for one post, the same amount of Likes, Shares and Comments (classic promotion/contest). This is a VERY clear symptom that this page is breaking the rules, don’t you think?

@nat_reynoldsThat depends how they “participate” and are “chosen” (in my opinion), but that doesnt sound like a competition, that sounds more like an advert?